Today we’re publishing an AI wage loss dashboard. It is a tool that takes AI-attributed job cut data, the average salary of those workers, along with potential wages lost, and estimates the impact per person in each state. The information is presented as a shareable card. It's one of the first projects from CAIS's public engagement team, and it represents two conversations that have been converging: AI-related job loss and AI’s ability to automate human labor.
Experts agree that AI's effect on the economy will be transformational in the near term. They specifically cite risks like large-scale job displacement. This is supported by data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas who reported that in the first half of 2026, companies directly attributed more than 100,000 job cuts to AI. That number only counts the companies that attribute the layoffs to AI in regulatory filings.
Our Remote Labor Index (RLI) anchors the automation conversation in real data. It benchmarks AI agents against paid freelance work including architecture and game development. The work is then judged by human evaluators against professional-quality deliverables. When we launched it, in collaboration with ScaleAI, the best AI agent completed 2.5% of projects at professional quality. Eight months later, that number is 15.8%.
A software engineer losing their job means $90,000 or more leaving the local economy, along with other employer related contributions, including insurance and taxes. It also means there is less available for people to spend with local businesses or for living expenses.
The dashboard does not account for the jobs created by AI, productivity gains, or re-employment. Economists disagree about whether displacement or creation wins out, and over what timeline.
We invite everyone to consider what the trajectory reflected in the current dashboard means because how we integrate AI into our lives is a choice. The more people who can see the full picture, the better equipped we all are to shape what comes next.
The dashboard is live at wageloss.ai